Heartbeat: Care and support go both ways

Lights of Hope illuminate St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, B.C., and are a magnet for photo fans on December 20, 2011.Photo by
Steve Bosch

As St. Paul’s Hospital ­Foundation’s CEO, Dick Vollet has a duty to inspire others to take the cause of helping the hospital to heart.

The hospital has a place in his own heart — St. Paul’s physicians monitored his congenital heart defect at the facility when he was a child, and again five years ago. Luckily, he didn’t need help for his condition. But the hospital does.

“One of the things we want to keep front of everyone’s mind is that St. Paul’s is the community hospital in the downtown core and needs to be renewed,” Vollet said.

Each year, the Lights of Hope Campaign, now in its 15th year, helps make improvements with the help of donors. The foundation aims to raise $2 million this year.

The money goes to fund extras often not provided for in core funding, such as more comfortable chairs for chemotherapy and dialysis patients and nicer family lounge areas. But the funds also go to major improvements: the foundation is planning to install a new CT scan in the emergency department next year, at a cost of $3 million. Recently, the foundation provided bridge financing to the researchers in the PROOF Centre’s organ-rejection blood test program to keep their groundbreaking work going.

“The money goes to fund the greatest needs of the hospital, and it gives us a lot of flexibility to respond to urgent equipment and research needs,” he said.

There are more than 200 corporate donors, but many of the supporters are actually St. Paul’s staff — from individual doctors and ­nurses to entire hospital departments banding together to fundraise.

Former patients also give back. Among them are John and Verna Wiens. John was set to have a kidney and heart transplant at St. Paul’s in 1999 when he suffered a near fatal cardiac arrest. Doctors and ­nurses spent 45 minutes trying to revive him. Miraculously, he survived and received his transplant five weeks later. They’ve been supporters of Lights of Hope ever since.

Building the display on the hospital’s Burrard Street facade is also a community effort. All materials, including 10 kilometres of holiday lights, are donated. It takes 100 volunteers six hours to set up.

This year’s campaign kicked off with the lighting ceremony Nov. 15. The lights will stay up until Jan. 10. Learn more at lightsofhope.com.

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